SimGuard – Yet Another Anti-Theft Application

Over the past year there has been a boom of new anti-theft applications for BlackBerry. Not sure if there is a demand for them but I guess they are worth mentioning. In my opinion you could just password protect your BlackBerry and save yourself some money.

When a mobile phone is stolen, the first thing the thief does is removing your SIM and inserting his. This way, you can’t call your own number and talk to the thief, or locate his position. If you know your phone’s IMEI you may block it with the support or network operators, but maybe you don’t have it written somewhere. SimGuard is a smart little application that runs at startup and checks the currently inserted SIM against a list of registered and approved SIMs. If the match fails, it means the device has been stolen! At that point SimGuard does the following:

It immediately and silently sends a SMS alert to your secondary number, and optionally to a list of other numbers you’ve previously chosen (e.g: your friend’s, partner’s or company’s number). The SMS is sent from the thief’s phone number, and it contains:

— The thief’s SIM’s IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity): this can be used by the police to find out the thief’s identity. (the phone number can also be used for that)

— Your device’s IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity): this can be used by network operators to block the device.

A second alert is optionally sent some minutes later with the thief’s location. If the device has a buit-in GPS, and there’s GPS coverage at that time, the alert includes the latitude/longitude. In all cases, the application tries to retrieve also the area code and cell ID the phone is currently connected to, for a less accurate positioning.

With all this information, you can make the phone unusable for the thief, and report the theft to the police providing essential information to identify and locate the thief. Not bad, eh?

I think I like the Gadget Trak Blackberry idea better, where you send a remote SMS command to wipe the data from the device, signal and alarm and have it send you location etc. With this you have to wait for them to remove the SIM card, which may be a while if they are selling the phone on eBay etc.

Actually, this is pretty nice. When someone steals your phone, they usually removes your sim as the first thing, so that you can’t track them down somehow. An app like this may solve the problem giving you the phone number of the thief’s sim….with that, you can do anything 😉

I bought this application today. Well, there isn’t much to say except it works as advertised. I don’t have GPS in my device though, so I can’t evaluate that. Very small, simple and stealthy program.
GadgetTrak does sound better, lots more features, but it also costs three times as much. SimGuard can be considered a “Lite” version.